archive

A long, troubled history in France

Jean-Loup Amselle (EHESS): To Count or Not to Count: The Debate on Ethnic and Diversity Statistics in France Today. France, slavery and colonization: French intellectual Louis-Georges Tin talks frankly about topics that are often left unsaid in his country. Bloc Identitaire: A lowdown on France’s new far-right. Swimsuit Issue: “Burqinis” notwithstanding, France isn’t being Islamized (and more on Talibans a la francaise). From FT, a review of Why the Dreyfus Affair Matters by Louis Begley (and more and more and more), For the Soul of France: Culture Wars in the Age of Dreyfus by Frederick Brown (and more and more and more and more), and Les artistes et l’affaire Dreyfus, 1898-1908 by Bertrand Tillier. How the Dreyfus Affair explains Sarkozy's burqa ban: Militant secularism has a long, troubled history in France, from paranoia over nun's wimples to the Dreyfusard anti-Jesuit campaigns. Christopher Hitchens on how French attempts to outlaw the burqa strike a blow for the rights of women (and more and more from Foreign Policy). How French women caught the British drinking disease. Eight hundred years ago, crusaders slaughtered twenty thousand people in Languedoc, France; today, fascination with the massacre has turned the region into a tourist trap. Lauren Elkin reviews Gilded Youth: Three Lives in France’s Belle Epoque by Kate Cambor. From LRB, a review of Paris Under Water: How the City of Light Survived the Great Flood of 1910 by Jeffrey Jackson (and more and more and more). Aaron Lake Smith visits the tiny town of Tarnac, home to France’s most famous alleged enemies of the state. Vive le Tarnac Nine: The French tradition of brainy sabotage lives on. A review of One Hundred Great French Books: From the Middle Ages to the Present by Lance Donaldson-Evans.